Contents

<ben_thatmustbeme> i am working at this time so i'll be listening in and only talk if needed

<aaronpk> scribenick: aaronpk

cwebber2: we have a couple new people today

<MMN-work> ben: They just discussed which song it was, some old one.

<ben_thatmustbeme> who are the new people?

<cwebber2> scribenick: cwebber2

aaronpk: I'm co-chair of this group with cwebber2 and editor of a couple of specs in the Working Group

<aaronpk> scribenick: aaronpk

ajordan: I usually go by AJ. I maintain pump.io, I started maintaining pump.io by accident. I'm in the working group and have done some work on activitypub

<ben_thatmustbeme> I'll do it on IRC

<ben_thatmustbeme> go ahead and i can write it up

cwebber2: i'm chris webber also co-chair of this group. I'm co-maintainer of mediagoblin which is implementing activitypub

<cwebber2> jaywink, are you irc only?

MMN-work: GNU social maintainer and interested in ActivityPub as a sort of evolution from OStatus which is what is used for federation (including WebSub, which should pass all tests as the implementation is PuSH v0.4 - we've renamed it recently in the source code).

<ajordan> MMN-work: did you submit an implementation report? ;)

<jaywink> cwebber2: yes

<cwebber2> jaywink, would you like to re-introduce yourself? we have a couple new people

<ben_thatmustbeme> Hi, Ben Roberts (ben.thatmustbe.me), Invited Expert in the Working Group, dev in the IndieWeb, Editor of JF2, and have a bunch of individual projects going

<MMN-work> ajordan: No, I've only tested the subscription so far. And this whole not-customer-with-github-etc .)

<MMN-work> ajordan: Tested with websub.rocks that is.

<ajordan> MMN-work: gotcha

<cwebber2> rhiaro, would you like to introduce yourself?

sandro: i'm sandro hawke, on the w3c staff. staff don't really participate in community groups. i'm here because i really believe in decentralization and i think this microblogging approach is a good start but normally i want to decentralize everything

tsyesika: I implemented federation on GNU MediaGoblin, and am coeditor on activitypub but have largely been dormant in the WG over the last year but hopefully i can participate in the group again as well as the community group

<jaywink> hi all (introduction). I work on my own project Socialhome mostly, which federates using the Diaspora protocol. SocialWG invited expert (though not super active), interested in implementing ActivityPub when the time is right. Generally interested in federated social web :)

<cwebber2> thanks jaywink

<rhiaro> I'm rhiaro, offline Amy Guy, SWWG staff contact among other things. I'm on irc only because I also just got a Real Job (tm)

SocialWG Updates

cwebber2: from activitypub, still moving forward on the test suite. there have been more things happening in other parts of the group

<cwebber2> scribenick: aaronpk

<cwebber2> scribenick: cwebber2

aaronpk: since webmention and micropub are Recs, the only one I'm tracking now is WebSub. We're about to publish a new CR with some updates dealing with response codes. We definitely need more implementation reports, so anyon who's implemented WebSub as a hub / subscriber / anything, please please submit implementation reports

sandro: the vote for extending the WG is still open ... so if you're involved with any organizations on that list, you can nudge them to weigh in on the vote, open for only 2 more days

content-less topics in websub

<cwebber2> scribenick: cwebber2

aaronpk: this is an issue in WebSub, it sounds similar to how Mastodon is handling subscription / deliveries, I wanted to hear from the group if anyone knows of someone doing something similar or interested

aaronpk: I'll quickly describe the issue here. here's the issue ... the historical way PuSH evolved is you have a feed and give a place where people can subscribe to real-time updates of that document. it's now moved to evolve to support other update types such as not just xml. this suggests something different where there might not even just be a document at a url. for example if you want to get updates from other updates from the site, you could use the homepage url to request updates even

if not a feed. sounds similar to how I think mastodon handles all delivery because they want to handle private content there isn't actually a url all posts appear at, there isn't actually an xml feed of all posts, so posts are delivered in the PuSH payload. this seems to be done because it seems to avoid authenticated feeds because you send update in the payload

<jaywink> brb back in 10

aaronpk: so first am I understanding this correctly about how Mastodon does things? and maybe MMN-work can explain how their system does it. and is this a necessary mechanism or are there other ways to solve this?

<ajordan> cwebber2++ for scribing

<Loqi> cwebber2 has 90 karma

<aaronpk> scribenick: aaronpk

sandro: my "uninformed" opinion is, I don't like this. it's best practice on the web to have every URL return some content. so any time you would make up a "virtual" URL you should probably handle GET requests on that. If you can't for access control reasons, you can give an access denied error. but in concept people should be able to prove they have access and then read it. so I don't see a reason to

have URLs that 404 that are still a topic URL

<Zakim> MMN-work, you wanted to guess a little bit

MMN-work: as far as i know, mastodon delivers private posts only in the payload and they don't have an accessible URL for that payload, so each notice doesn't resolve to a URL. what you subscribe to, the topic, is still a user account's atom feed, which just doesn't have private posts listed in there. ... The current model is they have the topic you subscribe to which isn't an empty meta URL, it just doesn't have the private posts in it.

sandro: at some point in the future if there were authentication, then someone with authenticated access would see the private posts. it's not the way i prefer to do authenticated resources but it does work.

introductions again

geppy: i'm working on an open annotation social site using activitypub

cwebber2: what are people working on specifically regarding the groups specs

<sandro> specifically, in SOLID we used the principle that each user has all-or-nothing access to each resource, instead of each user getting different views. But in the case where the resource is an aggregate, like a feed, it's more comnpled

sandro: i went ahead and created a mastodon instance w3c.social, i officially got permission this morning to run it

sandro: if they can read it they can tell who their representative is. otherwise they can email me.

<cwebber2> scribenick: cwebber2

<ben_thatmustbeme> there was some talk about timing of it just this morning

aaronpk: I think the last thing I've been working on is private webmentions, that's an attempt to verify webmentions for people that have access control. I guess that gets more interesting when you want to send webmentions from a private post. there's a private webmention draft spec written up, but we're still having conversations about what's the best approach. the thing I'm struggling with is do we try to solve proper server to

server oauth using urls as identities or do we take the shortcut of per-post permissions specifically. I'm interested in solving it if we have more poeple to bounce things off of

sandro: what's the best place online to see where this discussion's happening?

<ben_thatmustbeme> #indieweb-dev on freenode

aaronpk: I think most is happening on the indieweb dev channel ... with parts on wiki pages linked ... you'll notice a whole issues section on that page, which is part of the discussion on what's happening

<scribe> scribenick: aaronpk

cwebber2: if you don't have something in particular you want to share, that's fine ... i've been working on the activitypub test suite which i probably made more complicated than necessary. the client-to-server stuff is nearly complete. the big gap that's left is still the auth side of things.

<ben_thatmustbeme> currently working on rebuilding my entire webside in laravel , so going through all the micropub.rocks tests and have to rebuild my webmentions as well, so I will revisit it all soon. https://github.com/Inklings-io/splatter

<Loqi> [Inklings-io] splatter

cwebber2: at the moment, we've made it so you paste in an actor URL and bearer token. it will get a little trickier on the server-to-server side

<ben_thatmustbeme> also have been working on a super simple php websub hub, but its really just alpha at this spoint

cwebber2: I want to explore a signatures based approach which is a little controversial but i think is the ideal path forward

<jaywink> I started working on ActivityPub for my Python federation library (which currently handles DIaspora), but didn't get very far partly due to time issues but partly as I'm not sure how to handle things. Kinda waiting on Mastodon to show an example ;)

MMN-work: i'll work on the websub.rocks tests

<MMN-work> aaronpk: Yeah, I just need to sit down and not get distracted for a while .)

<tsyesika> I don't have anything to discuss this week btw :)

sandro: i'm interested in algorithmic feeds, not from the silo-make-money perspective, but as a user there is too much to follow so i want to hav ea bot to help pick out stuff to boost those. i'd be interested in any ideas people have around that. ... last week i was in a meeting of the credibility schema working group, a broad range of people including journalists, trying to figure out how to deal with fake news by annotations. somewhere in the pipeline of content being created and displayed to users via google/facebook/twitter, it'd be nice if there was a way to have annotations to help the system know whether things are credible

<ben_thatmustbeme> I also published an update of JF2 this week, which now includes JF2 Feed, which is a profile of JF2 that is incredibly close to JSONFeed, but is directly parsable from MF2